September 10, 1989

Home Was Where the Road Was

By DIANE ACKERMAN

WHAT AM I DOING HERE
By Bruce Chatwin.

bsessed with the life of nomads, about which he wrote with insight and tenderness, Bruce Chatwin was himself the essential wanderer,
who roamed the world for decades. Although he was forever pitching his tent somewhere new, he was not exactly a ''travel writer''; the phrase irritated him because it suggested too insular an attitude
toward the planet. Home was everywhere. All countries, in his mind, shared a common frontier. And the people he ran into on his travels were usually eccentric, improbable and exotic, whether they lived in the groomed drawing
rooms of France or slept under an arbor of stars in so-called primitive lands. Before he died in January, from what he described as ''a very rare Chinese fungus of the bone marrow,'' he put together
''What Am I Doing Here,'' a miscellaneous collection of his travel essays, reminiscences and fiction that contains some of his finest writing.

In ''The Coup,'' Chatwin tells of a visit to the dilapidated former slaving towns on the coast of Benin, where he was arrested as a suspected mercenary, strip-searched and forced to stand against a wall
in the raging sun, under a circling of vultures, while an angry crowd chanted ''Death to Mercenaries!'' Such events prompted him to write a novel, ''The Viceroy of Ouidah'' (1980),
which is set in that sort of cinematic locale.

When Werner Herzog decided to film the book, he invited Chatwin to visit the set in Africa. But by now the writer's illness had left him too frail to walk and climb stairs. He needed a wheelchair, but there was no way
to haul one through the jungle. Instead, as Chatwin reports in ''Werner Herzog in Ghana,'' the director offered to provide him with ''four hammockeers and a sunshade bearer,'' and
the ceremonial suavity of the gesture was impossible to refuse. Chatwin went, and took notes, sketching a wonderfully zany portrait of Mr. Herzog, a contradictory man with a ''laughing-skull tattoo on his shoulder,''
a mystical belief in ''the sacramental aspect of walking'' and an apparent penchant for organized disorder. ''The Viceroy of Ouidah,'' which concerns one of the most successful entrepreneurs
in the Brazilian-African slave trade, calls for a re-created 19th-century African court, but Mr. Herzog decided to use an actual contemporary African court instead, hiring the king and his subjects as actors and treating
them with ''old-fashioned Germanic courtliness.''

''Without a hint of condescension,'' Chatwin tells us with combined amusement and esteem, ''he takes a woman by the arm, as if he were escorting her to a ball, and shows her how to walk through
the Great Gate. The others follow. For the next shot he says, 'Ladies, you now have the privilege of giving us the best screams.' Or to the king: 'Nana, would you please lean back so we can see your very
royal face.' ''

The set required many walls of human skulls, and the villagers made hundreds of them out of plaster, which, because it chips, had to be constantly patched and repainted. Bystanders turned the area into a carnival, selling their
candies and hot fritters. One surreptitious young man was peddling something illicit-looking in plastic bags that Chatwin took to be marijuana, only to discover that the packets were full of false teeth. A man walking 40
dogs on a leash was busily buying up even more dogs, which, Chatwin learned, he later sold as food in the north of the country. There was a local watering hole called AYATOLLAH DRINKS BAR.

The movie's star, Klaus Kinski, revealed himself as ''a sexagenarian adolescent all in white with a mane of yellow hair,'' who, managing to irritate everyone, ''leaves a trail of smouldering
resentment wherever he goes.'' And then there were the hundreds of rowdy, down-and-dirty, costumed ''Amazons'' from Accra, who slept at the army barracks and made relentless demands on the
film crew's pocketbooks and patience. The whole wacky scene would make a wonderful movie itself, with Chatwin held aloft by hammockeers in the midst of the tumult.

Such vignettes are not uncommon in the unfolding pageant of Chatwin's travels. In China, he accompanies a geomancer, who wears ''a blue silk Nina Ricci tie, a gold wristwatch with a crocodile strap, and an immaculate
worsted grey suit'' to the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, whose builders want him to check it for ''malign or demonic presences.''

Chatwin seemed especially to prefer vibrant, earthy, outspoken, slightly farouche older women. In Russia, for example, he visits the elderly writer Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, whose ''hair
was coarse, like lichen, and the light from the bedside lamp shone through it. White metal fastenings glittered among the brown stumps of her teeth. A cigarette stuck to her lower lip. Her nose was a weapon. You knew for
certain she was one of the most powerful women in the world, and knew she knew it. . . . She waved me to a chair and, as she waved, one of her breasts tumbled out of her nightie. 'Tell me,' she shoved it back,
'are there any grand poets left in your country?' ''

In France, he finds Madeleine Vionnet, the famous dress designer who ''around 1900, rescued other women from the tyranny of the corset,'' invented the bias cut and from 1901 on designed ''seductive
peignoirs or tea-gowns: clothes to collapse in before the ordeal of dressing for dinner.'' At 96, Miss Vionnet is spunky and blunt as she reminisces about her salon days and how she fitted her designs to clients
from Argentina, women ''with undulating buttocks like carnivores.'' In the Peruvian desert, Chatwin meets Maria Reiche, ''the mad woman with the lines,'' as the locals call her, a
German mathematician who has spent almost half her 72 years perched on an aluminum ladder, studying the so-called ''Nazca lines,'' ancient Indian drawings of huge animals sprawled across the flat, dry
pampas.

In India, Chatwin travels with Indira Gandhi and then visits a recently captured wolf-boy. In the Himalayas, he searches for signs of the yeti, accompanied by a young Sherpa named Thunder-Lion, who ''had the habit
of prefacing his statements with 'I have something to say,' and of closing with 'That is all I have to say.' '' The Sherpas remind him that ''Man's real home is not a house,
but the Road,'' a theme that reverberates through all of Chatwin's writings. There are also meditations on restlessness itself, and why we are so driven to wander. And, in a more prosaic vein, Chatwin writes
about his brief stint as a young man working at Sotheby's (''Smootherboys as a friend likes to call it'').

Some of Chatwin's other books, such as ''In Patagonia'' and ''The Songlines,'' though full of captivating people and facts, lack structure, are written in a flat style and somehow
overlook the ravishing natural environment in which they are set. Chatwin often liked to blur just a little the line between fact and fiction, not entirely choosing one or the other, and not writing historical fiction or
so-called faction either. So, for example, we are to understand that ''The Songlines,'' though generally true, has some fictional elements in it - only we don't know where exactly or how many. As
a happy reader of both nature's truths and fiction's truths, I prefer knowing which general response is being asked for. When I'm reading about the aborigines, say, am I to be astonished by their inventiveness
or by the author's?

In ''What Am I Doing Here,'' Chatwin comes right out and tells us that five of the pieces are short stories, labeling each of them ''A Story'' lest there be any confusion. They're
the weakest part of this collection, and they read more like outtakes from his other books than self-contained works of fiction. But many of the essays in ''What Am I Doing Here'' are examples of Chatwin
at his best - part observer, part interviewer, part scholar. What brings them alive is his special talent for noticing life's strange, riveting details. He was a born Autolycus, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.
What comes through in his last book is a life miscellaneous and on the move, traveled on foot, but never pedestrian.

Diane Ackerman's books include ''On Extended Wings,'' a prose memoir, and ''Reverse Thunder,'' a dramatic poem about the life of Sor Juana de la Cruz.